[…]Lurking is the quiet watching/listening that what many people of the web do in chat rooms in order to begin gauging culture, learning jargon or lingo, and other community norms or unspoken principles before diving in to interact on a more direct level with other participants. While the word lurking can have a very negative connotation, online it often has a much more positive one, especially in regard to the health and civility of the commons. […]
Posts like these make me happy to be part of the Indieweb community. I have vivid memories of the late 90’s and early 00’s when things like RSS, comments, Atom, blogrolls and other sorts of blog-pieces were coming together. People were just figuring this stuff out, not companies. It all happened bottom-up, trying to fix ones own problems instead of building a solution in search of a problem.
I see the same thing happening today on the Indieweb again. Chris mentions a few excellent blogposts about lurking and reading, pinging others that you are part of their network, working on private posts for a small group of people. These are all problems that some individuals have. Where the large part of internet-population can’t be bothered about it. Yet. Since it doesn’t bring immediate value, it doesn’t scale (please…) and it takes too much work.
It will change. It will be slow, but things will change. You can say it’s hard to beat the tech-giants who have our attention and data. But didn’t we say the same thing about television networks, newspapers and shoppingmalls when the web arrived?
And yes, writing this post and linking to Chris’ post is me doing my bit to be part of this community and journey towards a better connected open web.
📖
Chris Aldrich
